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How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,433 posts.
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Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent
Perplexity AI claims it sends a user agent and respects robots.txt but it absolutely does not
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I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
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CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms
The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus, and that its founder has launched…
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Designing a Lego orrery
Designing a Lego orrery - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
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Stop Acting Like You're Famous
You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
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Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
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CSS for printing to paper
At work, one of the things I do pretty often is write print generators in HTML to recreate and replace forms that the company has traditionally done handwritten on paper or in Excel. This allows the company to move into new web-based tools where the form is autofilled by URL parameters from our database, while getting…
190
Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
Most computer systems we interact with have an auth system of some kind. The problem is, that sentence is at best unclear and at worst nonsense. "Auth" can mean at least two things: authentication or authorization [1] . Which do we mean for an "auth system"? It's never perfectly clear and, unfortunately, we often mean…
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The Monospace Web
Monospace fonts are dear to many of us. Some find them more readable, consistent, and beautiful, than their proportional alternatives. Maybe we’re just brainwashed from spending years in terminals? Or are we hopelessly nostalgic? I’m not sure. But I like them, and that’s why I started experimenting with all-monospace…
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Inside a $1 radar motion sensor
I recently got some cheap microwave motion sensors, mostly because I was wondering how China managed to make a radar for under a dollar:
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Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they
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Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
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The xz attack shell script
Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz…
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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets
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An animated introduction to Fourier series
This article will be part of an extensive series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphics), and hope that it will be helpful to anyone looking for a clear, visual introduction to these concepts. The article…
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Phased Array Microphone (2023)
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…
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My Colleague Julius
My colleague Julius par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
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Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use.
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All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
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Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the…
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Cyber Security: A pre-war reality check
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be…
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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task…
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Donating forks to the dining hall
A year and a half ago, the dining hall would run out of forks every evening. My roommates and I would inevitably have to eat with spoons.